"I was also able to leverage my programming background to creating some automated vba scripts which carved hundreds of hours a year off of my teams workload. Simple scripts that any developer could do but only a developer would think to do."

This is the sort of thing I enjoy. If you work as a regular programmer, you're usually walled off from the effects of your work, and you can spend months on a big project and then it all gets scrapped or becomes pointless for reasons outside of your control. And there are innumerable cogs between you and the customer/client. Your managers and PMs don't truly know what they want either. But helping someone that you interact with daily is tremendously more rewarding, regardless of how cool the technology is or isn't to the cognoscenti.